Russia has helped amplify and spread false and misleading internet claims about recent hurricanes in the United States and the federal government’s response, part of a wider effort by the Kremlin to manipulate America’s political discourse before the presidential election, new research shows.
The content, spread by Russian state media and networks of social media accounts and websites, criticizes the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, exploiting legitimate concerns about the recovery effort in an attempt to paint American leaders as incompetent and corrupt, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The London-based organization tracks disinformation and online extremism.
In some cases, the claims about the storms include fake images created using artificial intelligence, such as a photo depicting scenes of devastating flooding at Disney World that never happened, researchers say.
I have conservative family who are falling for this. Of course, they have a faith-based belief system as opposed to a reality-based belief system, so they’ll believe anything they are told.
The people who, when we were growing up, told us to not believe anything on the internet all of the sudden decided to start believing everything they read on the internet.
you know what? my parents didn’t tell me not to believe anything on the Internet. they taught me to be wary of information sources and how to be skeptical in a productive way.
the people that don’t have these skills are the ones that told you not to believe anything on the Internet. they don’t know how to tell what’s real and what’s not without their priest there to do it for them. now these people are all on the Internet without protection or guidance. the children that learned this behavior from them are here too. we had entire populations for generations that based all of their beliefs on what the local priest told them before the Internet. even after the printing press, many people relied on their religious leaders to interpret what was written for them.
for the most part, any non urban population would have burned you alive for trying to think for yourself for generations. now we’re all surprised that they aren’t very good calling out bullshit.
it’s almost like religion is often designed around letting the powerful control people. it WAS the system of hierarchy before capitalism. it’s where we got our social classes and kings from. it’s for the powerful to manipulate others. it’s working as intended.
This a lot but also they grew up in the time before their hero did away with the Fairness Doctrine, so when they were formative and watching Cronkite and Rather et al on TV, it wasn’t obscured through an echo chamber opinion piece masquerading as The Truth ™️so they never needed to think critically about their news sources bc I’m sure most of what was reported was factual (albeit whitewashed I’m sure)
so they’ll believe anything they are told.
Except the truth, for some reason.
This is what makes progressives’ work cut out for us. We can’t even use the same tactics, because what we’re saying makes people uncomfortable. People will happily believe the things that give them good feels and reinforce their existing beliefs. The truth of what we need to do and what change needs to happen and of injustice is not something that can be packaged and sold in feel good lies.
We can exploit the same rage-bait engagement-bait outrage tactics to mobilize people like us, but we can’t change people’s minds
It’d be great if Churches allocated a little time to preaching the value of critical thinking skills so that their congregation wasn’t so susceptible to misinformation, but then… Well, you know.
Russia played the long game and is winning the Cold War
I mean, pretty sure this is payback for the U.S. involvement in the collapse of the U.S.S.R.
Yeltsin seemed hopeful for good relationships with the west. He saw how communism failed. It’s Putin that misses his old KGB glory days. Fuck that guy.
Honestly, neoliberal states might have failed by now if the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed. Capitalism has just aboit finished eating itself as evidenced by no one being able to afford housing or groceries anymore, no real work being done that isn’t just feeding Wall Street quarterly goals, and just about everything being turned into a subscription service.
They’ll probably amplify this study too. They don’t give a fuck about American politics so long as it’s divisive.
Hypernormalisation
Watching YouTube about the hurricane there was a whole bunch of “these independent volunteers and groups are solving all the problems and are so much better than government.” It was weird.
I’m normally a big advocate of government programs but FEMA does kind of suck. My family lost a house in a natural disaster in the recent past and they were a nightmare to work with. They refused to offer any assistance without a significant amount of paperwork, they were constantly badgering us with seemingly unrelated questions, waited 6 months to pay out less than 5% of what the property was worth, and eventually decided we shouldn’t have gotten that and are still trying to get it back. On top of all that the IRS is auditing my family primarily due to this whole situation. My family is in a good enough financial position that we didn’t have to rely solely on their aid but if we did we would have been fucked for 6 months at least. The family member dealing with them still says he wishes he had turned them away and received no assistance at all.
All that to say, there’s legitimate reasons that people don’t like FEMA unrelated to Russian influence. My personal experience with them has been overwhelmingly negative to the point that I would not be happy to see them under any circumstances. I wouldn’t be out hunting them like some weirdo but that doesn’t mean I have a positive opinion of what they do.
Im not saying you’re wrong, but I’ve worked with fema and so has my family since we do restoration on thr affected houses, at least in my home state. And i never heard of nothing like this happening. I am sorry if thats how it worked out for you.
Thanks, I hope it goes better for most people. For what it’s worth the FEMA employees we talked to in person seemed to be genuinely interested in helping but that’s a big part of why it was so frustrating; the people on the ground were saying very different things than the people sending emails and approving funding.
Okay, but we’re talking about russia undermining americans trusts in FEMA. As bad as it is fod me to say this, even if your claim is true, this is not the time to be bringing it up.
Sure it is. If you want people to trust you then be trustworthy. Attempting to reclaim funds handed out during a disaster that were ridiculously difficult to obtain in the first place is not what I would call worthy of trust. If my experience with FEMA had been a positive one I’d be here saying good things about them but I’m not and that is entirely their fault, not Russia’s.
Russia can’t actually fight a real war so they rely on their enemies to fight it for them
Neo Pinkos, they support Iran too.
